You Don’t Know Me

An intense, gripping read, “You Don’t Know Me” consists almost entirely of one character speaking for himself in a court room, leaving us breathlessly following his story without pause to divert elsewhere. Not many authors could get away with such a story, but Mahmood pulls it off brilliantly.

Even more brilliant is the range of emotions this book created within me. All at once I felt bad for the main character, who has a very ‘disadvantaged’ background, yet I could never feel too bad due to his unique kind of in-eloquent intelligence. I felt conflicted and confused, was he a victim of his own environment and essentially a good person? But then again, he couldn’t be good if he did even half the things that he himself claimed that he did. This tugging back and forth with my emotions went from beginning to end, where I STILL don’t have an answer.